Radical feminists are moralists because women’s rights are a moral issue.

Radical feminists are moralists, huh? Misogynists had better look in the mirror.

Don’t tell me about how feminists are moralists like morals are a bad thing, or are only the domain of religious people, or are somehow not applicable when there’s a male orgasm involved.

Proclaiming that the sex industry must be legalized (over being decriminalized in order to protect johns) IS a moral statement!!

Saying that “sex work” is a “useful and necessary service” (for male dominance, that is) and therefore “good” is a moral statement.

Laws against rape, murder and so on are moral statements.

Women deserve the right to freedom, health and bodily integrity and that includes being able to report and prosecute for rape, assault, abuse, sexual harassment, etc. If women have such a hard enough time as it is doing so outside of the sex industry, then that difficulty must certainly be increased within it.

Men accuse radical feminists of being judgmental. Yet being judgmental is part of women’s powers of discernment. Without it women cannot recognize misogynists. And misogynists are absolutely harmful. Their attitudes perpetuate harm against women.

No straight white male has to worry about his so-called “right to sex” being taken away from him even when prostitution is criminalized because the system of patriarchy remains intact. That’s why you see conservatives advocating for criminalization while using prostituted women in secret. Laws against marital rape? He can just go to a prostituted woman! It’s not like it matters because she’s the one who really pays for it. Monogamy and sexual responsibility does not apply to males since by being the dominant sex-class they can exercise double standards of one rule for them and another for everyone else. Besides, it’s not like conservative attitudes towards women differ all that much from liberal attitudes towards women. Both exploit women’s “choices” for their own benefit, their own political power. And they use the State to do it.

Accusing radical feminists of being moralists goes hand-in-hand with accusing them of being in league with religious people and therefore being prudish fundamentalists. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, for 2 reasons: There are plenty of anti-sex industry arguments that don’t rely on religious rhetoric, and there are prostituted women (as well as johns, like mentioned before) who are religious. Many of the abolitionists are in fact women who are/were prostituted. So this holds no water. It’s just parroted by males enough that they hope it’ll stick, as ridiculous as it is, because being male means they’ll be taken seriously no matter what they’ll say. Same with the Happy Hooker myth, because it’s the image that sells.

None of this crap actually solves the problem of women not enjoying sex with men. If there is no intimacy at all and the sex is pretty much a one-sided affair in favor of the male, then that not only means a lack of pleasure and sexual attraction but a lack of desire on the behalf of the female. So there are some who are straight and aren’t attracted to the individual men, who are strangers, and others who are lesbian and aren’t attracted to men at all. And last time I checked, attraction to and need of money is not a sexual orientation. It then becomes apparent that it is men insisting on sex as their right, feeling entitled to it, whether women like it or not, and preferably without the use of force because it’s easier and less messy when they have a woman either desperate enough or groomed to acquiesce.

Calling abolitionists “ugly” and “jealous” is another matter. Any woman can be prostituted, and there is a “whorearchy” of a range of classes of women and the type of position they have in the sex industry. But most women have been conditioned into femininity, so it’s not like they don’t know about makeup and other feminine bullshit. Femininity is about submission, weakness, and self-loathing, which is why radical feminists rebel against it. It was created by men; it’s not rooted in femaleness at all. Do you know who else call females “ugly”? Trans women, who are essentially male, and whose activists promote “womanhood” with feminine stereotypes.

Instead, calling abolitionists “ugly” is a way of deflecting from johns’ own insecurities and acknowledging that harm comes from their own. They are not in fact “lonely men” since many are married or with girlfriends or are otherwise promiscuous, so that argument is out the window. None of them end up partnering with prostituted women or supporting female relatives in the sex industry, because they know it is damaging. Furthermore, from my knowledge they tend to marry women who do not look like their pornified fantasies. And if any are really are self-proclaimed “beta male” losers who can’t handle sexual rejection, then that is a sign they are dangerous and should be weeded out from society. A number of them are felons, including sex offenders who have high rates of recidivism, and serial rapists, which just proves my point – but not for the purpose of pitying these scumbags. The “give us prostitutes or we’ll rape you” line comes to mind here, but the reality is that women get raped anyway, especially the prostituted.

I couldn’t remember why it seemed weird that liberal men, even ancaps and Libertarians, argued that there is no such thing as truth. Oh, wait: Before the sex industry discussions, they were saying that they were searching for truth! How they wished I had forgotten.

“ “There is no such thing as truth.”

Whatever you try to posit, anyone can simply say that you can’t possibly be more “right” than they are because we really don’t know the entire truth about anything. So ultimately any positive position is just guesswork, any given argument can’t be any more valid than any other, and so no one can “win” and there’s no point in discussing anything.

The obvious problem with such a tactic, and this is a problem with all of these tactics really, is that it’s a semantics game. We live our lives as if we know many things with reasonable confidence. We also use the evidence of our senses to deduce or induce a great number of other things with reasonable confidence. Whatever you want to call those propositions, we all have them. It doesn’t matter if you call them “truths” or “things I am reasonably confident about,” or whatever you want.

This is the same semantics game as people who deny “objective reality.” Whatever it is that we perceive, there is something there. What you call it doesn’t change that fact. A rose by any other name is still a rose.”

I know women in the sex industry are abused. In the end it does not matter how many women are abused emotionally or physically or raped or murdered or infected or traumatized, even where the sex industry is legalized. It is not acceptable. There is no static data because victims are afraid to speak up so it is impossible to know the real numbers and I thought this was common sense. So when supporters argue that there is “sleight of hand” going on with the numbers it is apparent that they don’t care to know. No high enough percentage is good enough to make them give up or even question their support of the industry. Think about it: men still use prostituted women and children whether prostitution is legal or not.

Women deserve the right to not be sexually regulated by the state, and legalization of prostitution rather than decriminalization means even more codependency on the state. Amoralism and moral relativism do not apply here. I know ancaps and Libertarians think they are being witty by pulling the “self-ownership” spiel but it’s old hat. The patriarchal cult of domesticity, of male supremacy, wants women to stay in the bedroom and to not have political power. As one Libertarian john whined,”Women have hurt me my whole life, I don’t want them to have political power!” even as he ignored his history of brothers holding him down so his father could beat the shit out of him. Radical feminists realize this reality of men keeping women down and fight against it. When we say “female oppression is sex-based” it includes not only feminine gender stereotypes and fictional characters like the Whore but the transactional model of sex which serves compulsory heterosexuality and keeps women associating with men and identifying with their interests for survival. Female oppression is justified by supporters who don’t think women have any power in and of themselves.

Hell, even our livelihood depends on us conforming to femininity and pandering to the male gaze. Having to wear makeup for work and adhere to a feminine dress code, and being told by customers and strangers on the street to smile, being sexually harassed (including solicitation for sex), customers berating you, is allowed or you’ll be fired or in physical danger. This is not acceptable. Not shaving your legs and armpits in private does not help this situation.

I recently saw a show about WWII-era American women working in wartime manufacturing — i.e., Rosie the Riveter-type stuff. One of the things I learned about was something called a “Femininity Quotient.” You can probably take a guess as to what that meant. I didn’t even believe it was a real thing until I went home and looked it up (the show was a choir performance/musical, so I expected it to be kind of dramatized, but it turned out to be mostly accurate).

Anyway, the Femininity Quotient was exactly what it sounds like. Factory employers expected women to conform to certain standards of femininity while on the job: for example, wearing makeup, hair done, fingernails manicured, etc. Some factories actually held classes to teach their female employees how to maintain their “FQ.” Here‘s a source:

A Seattle newspaper article warned women not to “go berserk over the new opportunities for masculine clothing and mannish actions”… At Boeing Aircraft, the Women’s Recreational Activity Council offered classes in proper dress, makeup, poise, and personality to help women workers maintain their “FQ” (Femininity Quotient).

This got me thinking about that modified version of Rosie the Riveter that was getting passed around on tumblr a while back, you know, the “hard femme” or whatever Rosie who’s showing cleavage and playing with her hair. It was getting reblogged with commentary like “you don’t have to pretend to be a man in order to be empowered! you can be feminist and feminine~!” As others have pointed out, even aside from how offensive those kinds of statements are, they’re also totally ridiculous because Rosie the Riveter, and all the women like her, were already performing femininity — and as I learned from all this “FQ” business, they were specifically instructed by their employers to do so. So it’s really ironic that people use her, of all things, as their femmephobia talking point.

“For decades misogynists have claimed that their access to women’s bodies was an IMPLICIT obligation of ANY job held by a woman — that’s why the sexual harassment laws were passed in the first place!

So IF it were true that prostitution is “just another job” AND IF it were also true that “demanding sexual relations on the job = harassment” then those two concepts are incompatible with each other. One of those concepts would invalidate the other.

Prostitution could never be “just another job” because hey expecting sex from an employee or contract worker is automatically sexual harassment — regardless if any reward or punishment is given to the employee or contract worker in exchange for sex. So at best prostitution would have to be a special snowflake exemption; yet the reason for prostitution’s existence is still: hey men assume they are entitled to a special class of woman to be set aside expressly in order to satisfy their temporary desire. It’s clearly a domination mentality wherein either a special group women are supposed to exist as a less deserving class, OR, all women are supposed to exist as a less deserving class.

There is literally no way prostitution can be justified by a society which is focused on genuine fairness, and I stand by my earlier comment: Those psychopaths who advocate for special classes of human, should be physically removed from society.”

— comment by m.Andrea on Porn Part 11: The Difference Between Huffing Dong and Flipping Burgers

We are conditioned from an early age to conflate the idea of Western beauty with self-esteem; refusing to engage in it is “letting ourselves go,” being “unfuckable” (by men of course) and “ugly.” In a way, we’re expected to charm the employers who hire us. It’s not just about taking masculine characteristics like assertiveness and competitiveness; we have to be incredibly sociable and forever smiling, too. It’s about servitude. When people say a female boss “slept her way up the ladder,” they fail to mention that even if it were true (assuming for a moment), she was sleeping with men above her in power; in other words, they were were the ones abusing their positions of power.

Further progress in women’s rights, however, is simply giving women more ways of being dependent on men for power, since femininity cannot exist without masculinity. Radical feminists want liberation from patriarchy. And liberation depends on destroying gender norms.